Page 88 of See You There
“Nope. Though now that I know we have an internet connection, I need to reach out to the people I canceled on to see if they would like to do a streaming interview.”
Luke sipped his wine. “No more days off?”
Dahlia bit her lip. He was right. She had just been lamenting, working too hard. “It’s just the premiere—”
“I understand.” His smile was gentle, and her heart turned over. She searched for a way to change the subject, but Luke beat her to it.
“I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions about your marriage. I don’t know what happened, but I get the situation isn’t as black and white as I made it out to be.”
Dahlia watched him for a long moment. “Have you ever been married?” He shook his head. “Ever come close?”
“I thought I was in love once, in college. Maybe if my parents had been different, I would have taken a chance on a future, but…” Luke shrugged. “I wasn’t positive I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and so I ended it.”
“Couldn’t you have stayed together to see if it worked out? You might have changed your mind? You must have been young!”
Luke’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know how much you know about my father, but he was a serial monogamist. He’d meet a woman, they’d date for a year, she’d believe they had a future, and then he’d drop her. I saw dozens of women get their hearts broken by my father. As I got older, some of them even reached out to James and me, asking us to intervene.”
Dahlia could tell he was trying to keep his voice neutral, but pain laced every word.
“If Ieverget married, I want to be sure that it’s forever. With Talia, my college girlfriend, it wasn’t fair to her to drag it out, knowing I might never marry her, because I knew she would want to, eventually. After three years together, I couldn’t keep asking her to wait for me to be ready.”
“That must have been painful.”
“It was. But I got over it within six months, and two years later she was married with a baby. I was right. I learned from it.”
Dahlia frowned. Just because he was right in that instance didn’t mean it was going to be true foreveryrelationship.
“You don’t plan on getting married unless you have what—a lightning bolt moment? How can you trust that? What if it’s just lust? I had the lightning bolt with Scott. It turned out to be teenage hormones and a desire for freedom. Not love.” Dahlia couldn’t help the bitterness that crept into her voice. “I never should have married Scott. I was looking to be rescued and thought he was the answer.”
Luke frowned. “Rescued from what?”
Dahlia froze. Was she really considering telling him the truth? The inky black night pressed in on her, and she drew in a deep breath, followed by a large gulp of wine.
“My home life wasn’t… idyllic. Scott was a forceful personality, but he was nice to me. I genuinely thought he cared about me—for a time, it was true. My grandmother hated him, which only made me want him more.” Dahlia smiled ruefully. “Scott could be really kind when he wanted to be, but also terrible and cruel. I was an idiot teenager who imagined the extreme highs and lows were romantic evidence he was passionate about me. I was helping raise my siblings when he proposed, and at that point, I would have done anything to get away. But Scott had problems, and I thought it was my job to fix them. I traded one set of responsibilities for another.”
Luke’s eyes darkened as though he realized she was glossing over the important parts—which Dahlia was.
The loud bugs chirping around them added to the sense of unreality. Coming so close to death over the last few days had broken through most of the carefully constructed fortress Dahlia had built around her heart. And if she kept her eyes set on the darkness beyond the railing, she couldn’t see his reaction. The more the words spilled out, the lighter she felt.
She wanted to tell him. “My brother Brian got into drugs when he was fifteen. By the time he was sixteen, he was dealing. Drugs were everywhere in our town, and the money hemade helped with groceries. I never told him to stop,” Dahlia whispered, as guilt threatened to swamp her.
“Not that he would have listened to me… but I should have tried.” Dahlia dragged in a ragged breath. “Holden, my next younger brother, would do anything Brian did. He overdosed at a party.”
Dahlia’s throat closed on the words. “He was with Brian and some friends. Everybody ran, except Brian. He called an ambulance.” Pain rose in her chest, slashing her heart. Luke caught her hand where it dangled between the chairs and slipped his fingers through hers.
To her surprise, Dahlia’s brain didn’t shut down the way it normally did when she tried to recall the details of that night. Her lungs hurt. She needed to consciously inhale and exhale as her mind traveled back to that hot, sticky night. The phone call from her neighbor—their small-town grapevine reaching her before the authorities.
“Brian was arrested for distribution. He had ten grams of meth in his truck. When Holden died, they tacked manslaughter on top of it. My younger sister, Hannah was devastated, but thank god, the two youngest, Holly and Stephanie, were too young to understand what was happening. Mom couldn’t cope. She completely fell apart and died a week later in a car accident.”
Luke didn’t need to know her mother had been drunk, driving home from the strip club where she’d worked since Dahlia’s father’s death a few years before. A straight country road her mother had driven a thousand times, in worse conditions. Only to somehow end up head-on into a county telephone pole. The same pole that had taken Dahlia’s father.
Dahlia had always suspected it had been her mother’s way out, the same way Scott was hers.
“I rationalized that my sister Hannah was fourteen. She could take care of herself in the system, and hopefully, thetwins were too young to remember and had a shot at adoption. Hannah cried and screamed at me when the county came for them.
“I would have kept them, if I could,” Dahlia's voice broke. “The authorities said my grandmother was too old, and I was only eighteen. Even if I started dancing like my mom, I couldn’t make enough to support all of us. They all blamed me.”
Dahlia felt like she couldn’t breathe through the vise locked around her lungs. She waited for Luke to remove his hand, to recoil from the ugliness of her past. Instead, his warm fingers turned her hand over, and his thumb began tracing circles on her palm.
